AROT TNI TI-fE WORLD A Gordian Knot: The Ethnic Relations of the South Slays It is likely that the violent war now raging between the south Slavic peoples will be included among the most tragic of the twentieth century. The roots of the animosity extend far into the past. While a solution to today’s horrors will have to address the complicated interactions of history, the participants themselves must step outside their attachment to the past and attack the problem from new perspectives. Old Wine, New Bottles * Of Christianity and Empire: the Early History of the South Slays * Under Austria and the Ottomans: Conquest, Migrations, Conversion to Islam * The 19th Century: Intellectuals Debate Nationality * Coming Together, Breaking Apart: Yugosiavism, Greater Serbdom, Croatian Separatism * The Siovenes and Macedonians * The First Yugoslavia Is Born, 1918 * Circus Democracy and a Police State: Yugoslavia During the Interwar Period * World War II: Yugoslavia Shattered, Genocide and Resistance * Tito Tries to Solve the National Question * Tito Steps In * The Succession: From Tito’s Death to Today. Books, Gitanes and CDs By Nicholas Breyfogle chords and spraying rope dust. Throughout their tangled history, the south Slavic people Old Wine, New Bottles who came to make up what the twentieth century has known as We lived in peace for 50 years. We were neighbors, Yugoslavia have struggled with the forces of history. Their friends-Yugoslavians. I grew up never hearing eth memories reach back to an almost inconceivable degree, to nic hatred or plans for war. I loved summers in Sara Empires and religious conversion a thousand years ago. They jevo, when everyone would walk along the main relive their history in the conflicts of today, in stories, political street in the evening, stopping at cafés filled with friends and happy laughter. My friends were normal speeches, and radio and television. Each new step is justified by teenagers. We wanted to have fun, go to movies and a past step, each claim by a past claim, and each victimization by parties and shop. We didn’t choose friends based on a past victimization. History has brought them together but it whether we were Serbs, Croats or Muslims. has also torn them apart-sometimes with violence, sometimes Newsweek, March 8, 1993 with words. Today, the south Slays continue to struggle with their past- o wrote Naida Zecevic, an eighteen year old Bosnian, now a with religions, with ethnicity, with medieval empires, with the S first year student attending college in the USA and a de facto scars and changes made by the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires, refugee, exiled by the course of events from her family in Saraje with diaspora, with the impact of western notions of nationalism, vo. Her description fits well with past images of Yugoslavia as a with the violent breakup of those Empires, with the hungry tourist destination replete with startling mountains, lush coastal "Great Powers" resorts, who stood at their doors to gobble up the scraps, and a warm, inviting population who extended hospitali with different ty in old European conceptions of the unity of Yugoslavia, and with style. Yet, they are strange words to be read the approximately eighty years that they lived together under one ing these days. Hardly a day goes by without some’ further roof, often squabbling like the members of a family. It was a unfolding of the wars that rage between the people of family, but perhaps only one of convenience-never the best, Yugoslavia’s successor states. These wars now account for the only the better, solution. When the external threat of conquest most terrible fighting Europe has seen since the end of the Sec disappeared and the economy disintegrated in the late 1980s, the ond World War-some 50,000 to 150,000 dead, anywhere family began to break up-each member now striving to take between two and three million displaced persons, institutional with them as many of the family possessions, and, in fact, as ized policies of rape, and the habitual assortment of torture, many of the other family members, as possible. slaughter, imprisonment, deprivation, and starvation. It is a war After centuries, the longstanding questions still remain to be without boundaries in which the line between civilian and sol answered. Who shall control the lands of Bosnia and Hercegov dier, in the true Balkan tradition of brigandage and guerilla war ma? Will it fare, is so blurred and besmirched that it all too often be the Croats or the Serbs who lead the south Slays? disappears. How are national The ethnic relations of the south Slays are like boundaries defined-by ethnicity or historic the mythical precedent, Gordian knot. For hundreds of years they have by religion or by language? Who are the south Slays, struggled to one group or many? untangle the intertwining chords, proposing different solutions Who are the Bosnians? Are they all Serbs at or all Croats? Will various times. Recently, however, the solution of choice it be a federal or central political structure? has Who will decide? become, not for the first time in their history, the forcible separa With all this history, tion of the knot by violently hacking the bonds that tie, splitting the south Slays are caught in a paradox. On one hand, lasting solutions to the struggle will inevitably ORIGINS MAY1993 have to come to terms with the causes-causes whose origins lie Slays. deeply entrenched in the past. On the other hand, today’s partici The final important result of the Ottoman conquest was the pants must escape that very same history-must break the bonds conversion of a significant part of the population to Islam. The that condemn them to relive the past-so that they may address greatest incidence of voluntary conversion took place in Bosnia the contemporary situation with clear and rational minds. and Hercegovina. Many Bosnians and Hercegovinians had come Of Christianity and Empire: The Early History of the South to adhere to the breakaway Bogomil Christian sect. They wel Slays comed the coming of the Muslims, only too happy to escape the persecution of their Christian brothers. To this day, Bosnian The Slavic peoples who now inhabit the majority of the Balkan Muslims are resented by the other south Slays as Turkish collab peninsula migrated to their new homeland during the 6th and 7th orators and traitors. centuries and soon thereafter converted to Christianity. Those in Those Yugoslavs who fell under Hapsburg control- the west-the Slays of modern day Croatia, Slovenia-were con Slovenes, Croats, Serbs-underwent a very different series of verted by German speaking Roman Catholics, those in the east- changes and developments than their cousins under Ottoman ‘Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia-by Eastern Orthodox dominion-changes that have left their mark to the present. The Christians. With the schism that tore the Roman and Eastern Hapsburg Slays were exposed to German culture and the forces churches apart in 1054, the south Slays were permanently sepa of evolving capitalism. Administratively, the Hapsburg Slays rated one from the other. Bosnia and Hercegovina, situated on maintained traditional governing structures through the institu the dividing line between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern tion of the sabor-a governing assembly-and the ban-a gov Orthodox, were converted by both and were already a bone of ernor. Unlike the Ottoman Slav reliance on the church, the contention between the two sides. Croats and Slovenes relied on these political structures as nation During Medieval history, the south Slav lands developed al rallying points and for the upholding of tradition. two important empires-one centered on Croatia, the other on Serbia. Each empire expanded to control lands that today fall The NIneteenth Century: Intellectuals Debate Nationality under the jurisdiction of other nationalities. The Croatian king During the beginning of the nineteenth century, the concepts of dom, which included parts of what is today Bosnia, began in 924 nationality and nation that had developed from eighteenth centu and lasted for close to two hundred years. The Serbian peoples ry western European romanticism were taken up and applied by developed and maintained the strongest of the south Slav south Slavic intellectuals. Language, more than religion, cus medieval kingdoms, uniting the peoples of Montenegro, Herce tom, or even ethnicity was considered to be the all important govina, and Serbia. The kingdom reached its apex during the foundation of nationality. reign of Stepan Dusan 1331-1355 who expanded the borders to In Serbia, Vuk Karadzic standardized the Serbian language include all of modem Albania, Macedonia where Dusan located around the "stokavian" vernacular dialect. This act had a signifi his capital city, Skopje, parts of Bosnia, as well as a good por cant effect on Serbian-Croatian relations. The majority of the tion of Greece. In 1389, the Serb army was defeated by the Croats also spoke in the stokavian dialect-a potentially unifying Turks at Kosovo Polje-a battle that has taken on a mystical importance for the Serbian people and which lies at the heart of the Serbian determination to hold Kosovo. Under Austria and the Ottomans 14th to 19th Centuries: Conquest-MigratIons--ConversIon to Islam Today, pockets of ethnic Serbs are found spread throughout for LjutJijana ,_._‘Zagreb mer Yugoslav lands-in Croatia, in Bosnia aiid Hercegovina, in CROATIA Kosovo, in Vojvodina. This diaspora originated with the mass migrations westward that followed in K’jina the wake of the Ottoman Rgio Turkish Muslims invasions. The mass transfer continued in fits and starts over the course of the following centuries. It brought Croat and Serb together to live side by side and, over genera tions, they began to develop similar customs, traditions, and lan guage.